Note to readers: Sorry, had to remove the most recent post from a guest blogger who I just discovered had not complied with an essential condition of my guest-post guidelines, having published the same article word-for-word on his site. Here’s a replacement post written by me. Enjoy!

If you’re a blogger, you know a dashboard is more than the place you instinctively glance to check your speed when you pass a police car.

A blog’s dashboard is where much of the behind-the-scenes work of a site happens. It’s where editing occurs, posts are uploaded and comments are monitored. It’s where the blog’s theme is accessed and special uploadable features called plugins are activated.

Below are some of the standard features that are accessible to bloggers from their blog’s dashboard, allowing us to individualize the appearance and functionality of our blogs.

But these same characteristics can also be found in our own lives as well. And just as bloggers spend considerable time adjusting the elements of their dashboards to add content and improve the look and workability of their sites, so we would do well to do the same on the dashboards of our lives.

Nine Features on the Dashboard of Your Life

Theme

Most bloggers start with a pre-programmed theme and then tweak and adjust the code until it better suits them. Some themes are designed as political news blogs. Others are fashion or photo blogs. Some are neutral, easily adaptable to a variety of blogging genres.

Like a blog, our lives have themes as well. But can others tell what yours is by watching how you live? If family is a part of the theme of your life, for instance, can they tell? If character is, can your customers or business partners tell?

There’s a lot of talk about branding your blog these days. But what about branding your life? How we live, how we treat others, what we do with our time is a manifestation of our true values, much more than what our words claim them to be.

Perhaps it’s time to recode the theme of your life to more perfectly reflect your highest values and top priorities because once the theme is right, so much else is icing on the cake and falls into place.

Editor

As the founder of Meant to be Happy, I’m its sole editor-in-chief. Guest posts must meet my standards. I maintain full editing control and let guest bloggers know their work is subject to my literary eye.

My standards are fair (I believe) but exact. Are yours? How active is the editor of the thoughts and behaviors, attitudes and decisions you make on a daily basis?

Does your conscience play a significant editing role? Or do you outsource editing to the crowd, the boss, to peer pressure, pop culture or what the media proclaims is okay? If you do, don’t be surprised if the posts of your life are not quite up to par with few-to-no devoted Readers or Followers.

An editor with too harsh a critical eye keeps good content from being published. But an editor with no standards publishes trash and nonsense. So be careful to avoid both extremes when editing the content of how you live.

Spam Filter

Spam is the term used to describe mass comments or mass email sent by spammers to flood the internet. It takes up a blogger’s space and time. It is inconsiderate and meaningless, adding nothing of value to the work bloggers do. It is leach-like, sucking value, adding nothing.

If you think about it though, spam doesn’t merely attack blogs and email accounts. It plagues our lives as well, robbing us of precious time without adding value of any sort to it. To some, their spam is the TV and X-Box. For others, it’s Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

Perhaps it’s time to start identifying and blocking the spam that eats up your time, that robs you of intimacy with friends and family, that gets in the way of important projects and pursuing your goals, that binds you to a life of mediocrity. Your time is precious and valuable. Treat it that way and it will open up a world of possibility to you.

Comments

Most bloggers love getting comments and leaving comments on other blogs we follow. Getting other bloggers to leave comments on your site is validating. It means they recognize you as worthy of their valuable time.

It also means getting the chance to meet and develop online relationships with amazing people. Leaving comments is a way to interact with bloggers you appreciate and to lead traffic home if readers like what you leave behind in their comments section.

But what kind of comments are others leaving in our personal lives? Are they filled with anger and disdain? Or are they free and open and lovely? Are you leaving critical, harsh and contentious comments on the posts of other people’s lives? What kind of commenter are you in your interpersonal relationships? At work? On the freeway? And what does that say about you?

Many bloggers list a set of rules for leaving comments on their blogs. They welcome disagreement, but warn they will trash rude and abusive comments. Let’s make it a personal policy to toss invective and disrespect into the trash bin before sending our comments out into the world.

Are you harsh, impatient and critical? Are you vulgar and disrespectful? What does the language you use say about the person you are? Is your language elevated and elevating? Or is it demeaning, settling into the gutters and mud holes of life? What kind of ripples are you sending into hearts and minds of others?

It may be time to establish some guidelines of your own for the comments you leave and accept from others on life’s dashboard too.

Recent Drafts

Sometimes we write an article but are not yet ready to post it. We hold it as a draft until some future date for publication. The problem is that we sometimes hold our lives in draft as well, not yet willing to let go and truly start living.

What have you left waiting as a draft in your life? What step haven’t you taken? What goal remains only a wish because you haven’t taken action on it yet?

Instead of waiting for just the right time, when stars are aligned, everyone everywhere is supportive, the clouds have parted, circumstances are ideal, the wind is blowing at your back, and just hit publish. Clear out the drafts and move them to the front page of your life. Go back to school, start that business, go to the gym, take piano lessons, start a blog. Just decide and act: write the book, sing the song, hike the mountain, run the marathon.

But whatever you do, hit the publish button and post it! Put it out there for the world to see! Be and do and live your life today, in the open, published as you are.

After all, you can always edit as you go.

Widgets & Plugins

Bloggers also like to spice their generic themes up with a variety of cool bells and whistles. And there are some very cool plugins for sure. Two of my favorites on Meant to be Happy are my “Readers Favorites” plugin and the premium version of commentluv.

Our lives are often adorned with a variety of bells and whistles as well. What kind of plugins have you placed on the dashboard of your own life?

My favorite life plugins include family nights and date nights with my wife (one of my new year resolutions is to make them both a bit more regular!).

A plugin that has improved my general sense of well-being has been regular visits to the gym and to fit more so-called superfoods (spinach, yogurt, beans, turkey, blueberries, and the like) into my diet. Another is my prayer life and steady diet of uplifting literature and scripture.

What plugins have you added to the dashboard of your life to improve its functionality?

Caution: Be careful not to clutter your life with too many plugins (soccer practice, baseball, piano lessons, violin, dance, boy scouts, bowling night, girls-night-out, this, that and the other thing), robbing your family of needed quiet time together.

Trash

Is your blog loading slowly? Is it heavy with too many gadgets? Well, what about your life? Perhaps it’s loading slowly as well. Is it time to remove some of the personal clutter?

Every decision we make to engage in self-defeating habits can be trashed just as any post we no longer want on our blogs.

What habits and attitudes, residual offenses, left-over pain and heartache from past relationships or of years-gone-by clutter your emotional life? It’s time to clear that clutter too.

Are you hanging on to fear and anger and hatred? Is doubt and dishonesty, selfishness and cowardice cluttering the desktop of who you are?

Let go of your favorite bad habit that’s weighing you down, dragging your moral and emotional feet in the mud and stand and rise and shake off the extra baggage our habits add to our already-heavy lives. Hit the delete button and be done with it! And then move on.

Categories

Have you ever scrolled down and clicked on a subject listed in the Categories section of a blog’s sidebar? The Categories is a way to organize content around a general topic. It makes finding information about an area of interest easier for its readers.

Some personal development blogs have 3-4 categories (perhaps listed as Heart, Mind, Body and Soul, for instance). Others have upwards of 20 or so.

But don’t we all have categories on the dashboard of our own lives as well? What categories make up the sidebar of your life? How is your life organized around them?

We are parents and spouses, family members, friends and neighbors. We are citizens and students, employees and employers. We are club and church and political party members and community volunteers. We are examples and mentors and, perhaps, even bloggers.

But just as some subjects in the categories of a blog get clicked more than others, we also sometimes over-click certain categories in our busy lives.

Are you over-clicking the “work” category at the expense of your family responsibilities? How are the categories organized and prioritized in the sidebar of your daily living? What occupies the prime real estate of your life as you scroll up and down its sidebar?

Are you serving your spiritual and emotional needs as regularly as your physical and social ones? The answer to these questions is a clue that will go far in determining the quality of your life, whether endowed with balance or whether one or more life categories are precariously teetering on the edge of collapse.

Perhaps it’s time to delete a few categories, fix a couple broken links, create a new one or rearrange their order on your sidebar to better reflect your highest values.

Archives

Most blogs feature an archive page. It gives a reader access to previously written posts. It’s a record of all you’ve written, your thoughts spread over time. Some readers may be drawn to previous articles if the blogger’s writing is particularly good. The archives can provide access to what has been said before.

What have you archived in the storage room of your thoughts? Is the room dark and pain-filled? Or is it filled with joy and laughter?

You can change what you hold onto in the archives of your life by changing how you link to it. You do this by changing what you think about, what you choose to pull from those archives tucked away in your memory. By choosing what you dwell on, you go far in choosing what from your past will affect your current happiness.

Afterthoughts

Metaphors surround us. They are found in nature and modern life alike. They convey principles in the everydayness of life. As a result, they are easily remembered and are therefore of particular value when instructing others in principles you want remembered. While a blogging metaphor may not be universally helpful, my hope is that this one was helpful to you.

Please share

It would mean a lot to me if you would share your thoughts in the comments.

Don’t forget to Share, Tweet and Google + this post if you found it of value. I would deeply appreciate it.

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37 Comments

Oh Ken! I love this. (Am I getting repetitive or what!) Truth prevails though. You know, I love this kind of post and your wonderful interpretation of a blog’s dashboard to life’s dashboard.

I see some great advice here. This could be one of my favorite posts here, Ken. I sometimes suffer from the Recent Drafts – and realized one could be similar to this post, but a different metaphor. I see that it is time to edit it and hit that publish button!

So glad you liked the article. Most of us have at least some things as drafts in our lives. The most important thing is to be sure that holding our lives in draft is not the general pattern of our lives. So go for it Vidya! What do you have to lose, right?

Thanks for the awesome comments and encouragement. I truly appreciate you.

Haha! I’m already thinking differently about my dashboard. We do live there, huh! Some of us may spend a little too much of our lives on our dashboards. I recently (yesterday!) had an epiphany of sorts about that very thing — it’ll be my next post. 🙂

Ken…
I agree with the other comments. Your metaphors are clear, meaningful and written in a style that readers can relate to.

The other thought i have is that a lot of bloggers are too afraid to step out of the norm and say what they really think some or all of the time without even knowing it. This is a mirror of what we do in our lives. I’m working diligently on this specific issue. It’s step by step changes for me but worth it…I’m seeing results.

I’ve seen that claim before on several sites and wonder how that would be measured. But to the degree it’s true, why do you think bloggers aren’t telling it like they see it? Is it a fear of alienating part of their audience or perhaps offending other bloggers? I also wonder if the in-your-face bloggers develop a reputation of honesty and non-in-your-face bloggers are seen by contrast as keeping some opinions to themselves, which makes me wonder if the issue is less an issue of being open and honest and more an issue of seeing the world differently, one through more cynical eyes and the other less so. Hmmm. Just wondering out loud.

But regardless, so glad you’ve been able to take steps that have provided results. Thanks for such a thought-provoking comment, Fran. These are the best kinds! Keep ’em coming! 🙂

Very creative metaphor for life! It’s a good reminder to pay better attention to our dashboard and explore how the archives, drafts, and plugins can leave us overwhelmed and confused if we don’t keep things in order! A very fun post my friend! Hope you have a great week!Joe recently posted … 4 Steps to Defeat Your Darkside

Thanks Joe! Things here are so crammed full of projects and all, that I hardly have time to breathe, much less to make it to my favorite sites to comment on awesome material. But as soon as I figure out a way to balance it all, I’ll head over to yours more often to say hello. I miss my favorite authors of intelligent thought!

Yes, the post was fun to write too. I kept coming up with new analogies from the dashboard concept and just had to eventually cut it off. As is, it’s already over 2,000 words! Whew!

You’re so right that keeping things in order, prioritized and organized, can do much to keep us from becoming overwhelmed at all the stuff to do in life.

When I started reading this article, I quickly got the metaphor, but I did not foresee the number of meaningful analogies you could draw from it! I bet you had a lot of fun with this. Maybe you looked at your dashboard and just started making connections. Let’s see, spam filter….

Someone recently said something to me about my blog’s brand. I’ve heard that term, but hadn’t really thought about it. The analogy to how we are branding our lives really made me stop and think. Well, all the analogies really made me stop and think!

Besides the quality of ideas and writing, which is always present on your blog, I also appreciated seeing how you handled an unfortunate incident with your guest blogger. Thanks for sharing that.Galen Pearl recently posted … The Words Do Make a Difference

Hi Galen! Yes, I did have a lot of fun with this. And I could have gone on too (I originally included elements like updates, appearance, tags and setting. But the thing was just growing way too long (over 2,000 words as is). But that’s exactly what I did once the idea came to me. I opened my dashboard and started letting my mind wander.

It was an uncomfortable moment, for sure. I emailed the person who had forwarded his post to me (she has a publicity-type company) who replied quickly apologizing and told me she had dropped him as a client.

Live and learn, eh?

Thanks for the comment and the friendship, Galen. I look forward to seeing my thoughts in print on your site soon with my forthcoming guest post!

An apropos metaphor, Ken! I find blog comments to be incredibly insightful windows into us all. Commentors that feel worthy express authentically. When we feel worthy, we project prosperity. A consciousness of prosperity inhibits the mechanical ‘poor me’ from expressing. The comments are always extraordinary, uplifting and honest.

With feeling worthy comes the feeling of self-fondness. When we feel fondness for ourself, we feel fondness for all of humanity. It all begins on the inside. When we engage in interesting comments that bring out the best in others, it’s because we are feeling fond of them, which means we are feeling fondness for ourselves. We see them as valuable because we feel valuable. Everyone wins!!rob white recently posted … Introducing WROAR Blog Talk Radio

I love your thinking, Rob. Such fluidity of love, flowing from a place of abundance!

I also like the wording you use for liking ourselves: “self-fondness.” When we feel self-fondness, we can let down our guard, there is self-confidence, self-acceptance, authenticity because there is no temptation to pretend or hide behind exaggerated self-descriptions. And form that place of emotional strength, like you so eloquently said, so much more love can flow into other people’s lives. Indeed, it all starts on the inside!

Great idea relating blogs to life! I think many of us aim to be very honest and open in our blogs and that is reflected in our work. I know looking back at my posts that I have some posts where I am working through an issue, others that tell stories, but the majority I try to be uplifting which is how I truly like to live my life. Thank you for the opportunity to see the mirror.Wendy Irene recently posted … Motivation to Exercise

I love all the ideas and honest expressions of so many personal growth sagas out there on so many blogs. So much inspiration! And your honesty and openness and sincerity is so evident too.

Mirrors are an important part of the personal growth process, right? We all need them held to us from time to time. But I’m sure yours shows a character reflection that doesn’t need as much Spackle and putty as mine! 😉

“Do you outsource editing to the crowd, the boss, to peer pressure, pop culture or what the media proclaims is okay?” There’s so much power behind asking and answering this question for ourselves. Too often, we allow the content of our thoughts to be created by those who have no business in our heads. We must deliberately choose our thoughts to live our own lives.Nea | Self Improvement Saga recently posted … Inspirational Thoughts: Evict Your Inner Critic

Thanks for the wonderful article. Your statement “Are you serving your spiritual and emotional needs as regularly as your physical and social ones? The answer to these questions is a clue that will go far in determining the quality of your life”, really hit home with me. I”ve been going through a tough time for the last 2 years but with the help of meditation and some of the other widgets you speak of I’m back to being happy and peaceful. Thanks for your beautiful site.Jerry Patterson recently posted … Feb 26, Graco Booster Seat Review:Graco Nautilus Car Seat 3 in 1 Car Seat

Welcome home, Jerry! So glad you’ve come back to being happy and at peace. Such climbs can be tough to make. They require a degree of courage to even start that many people never really understand. So congratulations on climbing that mountain! And thank you for your kind words as well. I’m just thrilled my words meant something to you.

it makes perfect sense, this dashboard metaphor and I love it…. can I add “blog roll”? just as a sudden brainstormed idea?

Blog roll is where we link to sites we love, be it our friends’s budding blogs, or other websites we draw inspiration from. it’s our direct contact with our outside world. we all add blog rolls in different formats for different reasons

i find it similar to reaching out to building contacts, acquaintances, friends, soulmates. what kind of friend are we for them too? And who do we allow into our inner world to share our every joy and sorrow?

hmm… a little bit stuck here, perhaps Ken you can draw a better parallel, or not at all. it’ just popped into my little head 🙂

I LOVE it, Noch! I think what you said and how you said it is perfect. We really do need friends. I’m an introvert by nature. Give me a laptop, a desk and a day to think and write and I’m a happy camper. But on another level, people really are tremendously important. Study after study has come to the same conclusions, that those with close friends (and it doesn’t have to be many friends) lead richer, longer, happier lives. The kinds of friends matters too. We can add quality sites to our blog rolls or sites filled with diatribe and invective, spammy sites and destructive sites filled with rage and hate. It’s been said that we can judge the quality of a persons character by the friends they keep. The kind of people we link to in our personal blog rolls, then, says a lot about who we are and what we value.

Ken, how fun! I loved reading this post – such a fresh creative way of looking at life. I especially loved the way you drew the plugin parallel. “Caution: Be careful not to clutter your life with too many plugins (soccer practice, baseball, piano lessons, violin, dance, boy scouts, bowling night, girls-night-out, this, that and the other thing), robbing your family of needed quiet time together.” Just like too many plugins can ruin one’s website, it can ruin one’s personal life. Yes they may all look like great ideas, but that kind of clutter is more dangerous than a cluttered office 🙂

Thank you, Aileen! I know people who have filled their lives with so much activity that by the time their kids grew up, they hardly knew them. They never took the time to be with them. They drove them places, but never had many teaching moments or deep conversations. They all lived under the same roof, but that was about all they knew of each other.

Great post Ken! I’m sure everyone who uses wordpress had a smile on their face the whole time they were reading this. I know I did.
I just need to get my spam filter working!! 🙂Betsy at Zen Mama recently posted … A Dark And Stormy Night Miracle!

I like it. It’s true, the more we open ourselves to seeing the gifts life offers, the greater joy we’ll take in it. They key to daily happiness is to be filled with gratitude for all we’re blessed with, even the mundane, perhaps especially the mundane.

I love this analogy. You have hit home on every point. I found your advice speaking directly to me in several cases. Thankfully the editor and spam filter of my life are in place, but I do have some drafts that I need to publish.

Having written a book on happiness, I was delighted to discover your blog.
I enjoy writing this type of article, but haven’t done so for a while. You’ve encouraged me to get back to it since metaphors are a powerful way to convey meaning.

So good to meet you, Flora! I’m thrilled I was able to hit home a few times for you! 🙂

I think we all have some drafts we hold on to a little longer than we need. And I suppose that’s okay so long as we don’t hold onto them so long they start wilting and disappear altogether.

Metaphors can be powerful, for sure. And they’re just plain fun to write as well. Hope you drop by again, especially when you’ve written your next metaphor-type post to leave a link so I can follow it over and give it a read!

[…] I love the way he uses metaphors. I highly recommend one of my all-time favorites: his post “What is on the dashboard of your life” where he uses the blog dashboard as a metaphor to take stock of our lives. This post made it […]

[…] I love the way he uses metaphors. I highly recommend one of my all-time favorites: his post “What is on the dashboard of your life” where he uses the blog dashboard as a metaphor to take stock of our lives. This post made it […]

[…] useful resources. An About Me page. I played with widgets. I played with codes. I played with my dashboard. I figured out, through trial and error, various how-to-s and how not-to-s. I had arguments with my […]

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About Me

My name is Ken Wert, the founder of M2bH. My purpose here is to teach you how to live a richer life of greater purpose and meaning, of mind-blowing possibility and deeper, more soul-satisfying happiness than you ever dreamt was possible. Join us on this happy adventure as you learn how to unlock your hidden potential to enjoy the rewards of a life well lived. Read more ...